Govdex Beta

Web App Redevelopment

The objective

To completely re-envisage and redevelop the existing website and web app to better meet users needs, improve usability and accessibility.

What was involved

Branding

The existing site had an extremely dated design with no real branding.
This meant creating a colour scheme and visual style guide from scratch for govdex. It's final style having to convey trust and security, in a modern and simple way.

Design

Working together with business, support and development teams we came up with a simplified set of requirements to better define govdex's core purpose.

Starting with hand drawn sketches consolidating all ideas. Once finalised, detailed designs were created and a visual style for the site was developed and applied to the basic sketched concepts previously created.
Once the high fidelity mockups were complete, we sought further feedback; who's suggestions were fed back into the final designs.

The styling and designs from this beta were rolled into the administration sections of the current service.

Development

Created as a set of custom themes — one for each of the site's two distinct styles (public pages and the logged in, web app pages) on top of WordPress. For speed of development, we chose to use Twitter Boostrap.
We integrated with Elasticsearch, for improved search and LDAP, to leverage existing user database and external web apps still in use.

Front end features were initially build to function as much as possible without relying JavaScript (something some of users did not have, and could not, enable).
Then later, we were able to improve the UX dramatically, by adding JS based implementations on top; providing the best experience possible, regarless of if JS was enabled.